Date:27/08/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/08/27/stories/2007082755641200.htm

Opinion - Editorials

Resurgent terror, wider implications

As a traumatised Hyderabad mourns its dead, India’s strategic community has begun to grapple with the possibility of Saturday’s bombings, which snuffed out 40 innocent lives, heralding a renewed wave of terror strikes intended to undermine communal amity in India and derail India-Pakistan détente. Barely a year ago, armed with western guarantees that President Pervez Musharraf was committed to ending terrorism directed at India, Prime Minister Manmohan Sin gh revived the dialogue process with Pakistan. Among its notable features was the creation of an India-Pakistan joint counter-terrorism mechanism. Since then, Islamist terror groups and their supporters within the Pakistani military establishment have repeatedly sought to undermine General Musharraf’s commitment to end terror. The Samjhauta Express bombing and the strike on the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad were intended to strip General Musharraf’s anti-jihad stance of legitimacy within Pakistan. Many in India’s strategic community fear that the bombings in Hyderabad — the first major strike directed at non-Muslim civilians since the Mumbai serial bombings of 2006 — mean that Islamist terror groups have broken their shackles. They have little doubt that General Musharraf’s domestic travails have strengthened pro-jihad hawks in Pakistan — a trend reflected in the unusually high level of infiltration across the Line of Control this summer.

Going by available intelligence, the nature of the explosives, and the bomb-maker’s construction techniques — what forensic experts call a ‘signature’ — it is most likely that the attacks were carried out by the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI). Drawn from disparate groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad, HuJI’s cadres are thought to be tightly controlled. A mass of credible electronic intelligence suggests that HuJI’s director of south India operations, Abdul Sahel Mohammad, operates out of Karachi. Mohammad — a one-time Hyderabad resident who uses the code names ‘Shahid’ and ‘Bilal’ — is wanted by Interpol for at least four separate terror strikes. Pakistan has responded to Indian calls for his arrest by flatly denying his presence on its soil. Prime Minister Singh, himself in political trouble, needs to ensure that the détente process survives the shock waves from Hyderabad. Simultaneously, he faces the uphill task of mounting pressure on Islamabad, with concrete evidence in hand, to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorist groups. The Prime Minister is not the only one facing tough challenges. Indian intelligence has known since March 2007 that eight kilogrammes of military-grade explosive were delivered to an HuJI operative in Hyderabad. However, for its own reasons, the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh did not allow the kinds of aggressive — and unpopular — policing that the Central Bureau of Investigation and city police felt were necessary to secure the city. Neither during the recent communal incidents nor in response to the attack on Taslima Nasrin by fundamentalist thugs did the government demonstrate the kind of even-handed political and administrative resolve needed to address the deep communal strains in Hyderabad. It is true that successive governments have failed on this count since 1993, when the first Lashkar-e-Taiba terror module formed in the city. This makes the latest inaction all the more inexcusable.